The Ledger, every show

“But I think in two months, I think, 99.9% of the people who are using Anthropic and OpenAI today is going to go back to using their products, not DeepSeek's model.”

“I think five years time, like, I think everyone's like, why the fuck did we spend five years talking about algorithms as being like a coworker? It's just like software that does things for us. And sometimes maybe you want to chat with it. That's great. That's …”

“I think in Europe, the VC industry is still dominated by people who used to work in private equity, and that's a very different mindset than technologists, right?”

“I actually do think that maybe not us, but maybe our kids, kids are going to be one of the last generations they'll read and write as like the default web communication. I think we'll increasingly just consume everything via video and audio.”

“We don't, as a company have, we don't see ourselves as having to uphold any kind of right of free speech. And frankly, from a business perspective, having someone pay me 30 dollars a month to create very questionable conspiracy content, it's just not good busi…”

“Europe has all the AI regulation and none of the AI companies.”

“I think the biggest growth tactic right now in AI, right, is just announce a bunch of stuff, that may not actually be ready or work in the products. I think we'll, we'll see how that pans out over time. That's the sort of extreme version of this. I wouldn't ne…”

“They're not production ready for 95% of the tasks that people think that they want to use them for.”

“And I think we'll see that a lot of harmful use of these technologies will emerge from kind of like the open source world.”

“There's this weird thing in AI right now where it's very fear driven, and people are very willing to part ways with their money, both on consumer side, but also businesses to try out new things, right? Because everyone is scared that their business is going to…”

“Where AI really shines is still augmenting humans, right? In the case of us, we augment people to make videos. Cursor works so well because it puts the human in the driving seat and just makes you more efficient. I think this, like, pipe dream of agents, like,…”

“I mean, I think we're definitely in a bubble, right? There's a lot of money that's gonna go up in flames in AI products.”

“In 10 years, you're gonna be able to make a Hollywood film from your laptop, needing nothing else than your imagination.”

“Unless you have product market fit, like you shouldn't have product managers and sales people, right? That is your job as a founder.”

“We have one particular competitor that, I mean, literally verbatim copied like our mission statement, like everything I say, they like just copy everything that we do.”

“I really, really hate it when people call, like, AI employees. I think it's, like, I think it's so dumb. I think it's not helpful to build useful technologies that people want to adopt. And I just think it's the wrong way of thinking about that. You're going t…”

“I actually think I would do X. I think they're all great companies. I would do X because I think there, there's the most asymmetric upside if Elon delivers what he usually does. And I mean, we've all heard of some of the, like, that data set that he built, lik…”

“I think they will continue, but I don't think it's just going to be linear. Like whoever has the most compute is going to win.”

“Someone will come up with an algorithm that can, that is like 10, a hundred times as efficient as what it is today.”

“I don't think that like humans moderating content is the right way forward.”

“I think that's something we're going to see the next couple of years is that the winning companies are going to be the ones that are not overly obsessed about the AI component of their platforms, but who build for workflow.”

“I think it'll come out and it'll be like, good. It'll be definitely better than the previous things. But I think most people will not like care that much because the bar for someone to really care that much is incredibly high, right?”

“It means that people like yourself, YouTube creators, everyone else can compete with Hollywood in terms of what they can bring to life, right?”

“Definitely AI made content for sure.”

“A two minute long TikTok video is a better way of understanding a topic Then a 20 minute long YouTube video, which is a better way of understanding a topic than a few hundred page book.”

“You could make, you know, a video of you talking about something in a couple of years, no one will be able to tell if it's actually real or not, but it won't really matter that much. What matters is that you made it right and that whatever you say in that vide…”

“In Europe, I think people, again, for good and for better and for worse, right? I think people are, they think less like that, right? As you of course know, like stock options in Europe, people still view it as like, A random lottery ticket, not really as part…”

“Honestly, I don't really have a strong sense that people work way harder in the Valley. I actually don't like, I know a couple of great friends who've moved over there and opened offices. And I have not heard from any of them that like, wow, people just work s…”

“The London Stock Exchange, like, they need to fix that, like, they need to put some liquidity in the system. I don't know, I'm not a financier, so I don't know what they need to do to fix it, but I mean, that is a disaster, right?”

“I think studying business controversial opinion is like mostly useless. I think you have to do that by learning and you can, there's basically like 10 ideas in business. And if you learn those, you'll be pretty well covered.”

“I think it, I'm 100% certain that they have to take no seconders at all. We would definitely have thought about selling much earlier.”

“We said that in 10 years, it's gonna be possible to create a Hollywood film from your laptop, not needing anything else. That's 2017, and at current rate of progress, that wouldn't really surprise me. So I think we got the timeline sort of like ballpark right”

“Data is definitely going to be very, very important, and it's probably going to be more important than the model layer, in my opinion, over time.”

“Which I think is very unique to AI, is that people are actually very willing to pay to try something out, both in enterprise and personally, much more so than the kind of previous generations of SaaS.”

“I would say the two big aha moments was, the first one was like, people are not replacing video production, they're replacing text. That's very fundamental to our understanding of like, why this product is valuable.”

“We are building technology to eventually replace the entire physical production process.”

“These types of videos Essentially became not a replacement for video production, but a replacement for text.”

“And I think we're going to see that a lot in the next couple of years that this is going to be a requirement for big companies to work with Genesive AI.”

“And I think there's lots of other things like this, but I really think that one of the biggest opportunities right now is actually not necessarily selling the tools. It's actually creating the content and monetizing that content. Because the tools are becoming…”

“So the big idea that Synthesia is built around, right, is that video production and media production in general is going to go from something that we record with cameras and microphone to something we code with computers.”

“Moving forward, this will make it as easy to create a video-driven website as a text-driven website, and I think that's going to have major implications for how we kind of go about the user experience online.”

“We definitely believe that we're all going to have a digital representation of ourselves kind of an avatar of ourselves that we can use for creating video, maybe even Zoom calls, stuff in the future.”

“If you look at the video value chain, no one has ever managed to build a really big company about enterprise video.”

“I still think if you want to build a hundred billion dollar company, You've got to need a lot of salespeople. You've got to need a lot of engineers.”

“Having a team of 20 people instead of five people trying to learn that, I think actually slows you down.”

“And you're not gonna win that by just bootstrapping all the way, right? I think that's a myth.”

“We had a massive reacceleration kind of the second half of the year and a big part of that is actually because our competitors did a whole bunch of marketing for the category. We clearly had the superior product. And so that actually helped us quite, quite sig…”

“But if you look at most software out there today, it's very complex and it's not just technology, right? It's a lot of humans, it's customers, it's feedback loops. And I don't think we're anywhere near being able to automate those things.”